For our seventh annual Fintech 50, 25 of our picks have never appeared on the list. Crypto companies and startups trying to make banking cheaper and more accessible for small businesses made a particularly strong showing.
Reported by Nina Bambysheva, Margherita Beale, Jason Bisnoff, Isabel Contreras, Michael del Castillo, Kevin Dowd, Steven Ehrlich, Jeff Kauflin, Jonathan Ponciano and Hank Tucker
Last year, as the pandemic continued to push more buying and banking online and the price of both bitcoin and tech stocks climbed, venture capitalists poured money into fintech— a total of $133 billion globally, almost three times the $49 billion they invested the year before, according to CB Insights. That flood of capital carried so many promising startups to the next level that our job at Forbes of whittling down the fintech universe to the 50 most innovative startups was the hardest it’s ever been. In fact, there were so many intriguing candidates that half of our picks on this list, our seventh annual Fintech 50, have never appeared on the list before. That’s the highest number of newcomers we’ve had since the list debuted in 2015.
Among this year’s newcomers is a big contingent of startups working to make banking faster and more accessible for other businesses. For example, Plaid cofounder William Hockey and his wife Annie Hockey bought a federally chartered bank for $50 million, renamed it Column, and are using it to provide non-bank fintechs with a suite of banking services like holding deposits and interbank transfers. Another Plaid alum, Sima Gandhi, launched Creative Juice, which caters to creators, offering them not only bank services, but also funding of $25,000 to $500,000, in return for a share of future revenues. Former trader Michael Rangel founded fast-growing startup Novo to offer free checking accounts and other app-based financial tools to small businesses.
With bitcoin hitting nearly $68,000 last year, crypto startups saw an influx of new customers–and our list contains four new crypto and blockchain honorees. Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading platform FTX reached an 11% market share of the $2.4 trillion in global derivatives traded each month. OpenSea became the go-to place for people to buy and sell nonfungible tokens, processing about $3 billion in transactions a month. Crypto analytics firm TRM Labs, which helps financial institutions and government agencies like the IRS investigate money laundering, crypto fraud and other financial crimes, is already monitoring more than one million different digital assets.
And one San Francisco startup, Chipper Cash, hit a $2.2 billion valuation in just three years by helping Africans transfer money cheaply and easily. Founded by Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled, entrepreneurs from Uganda and Ghana, Chipper also lets consumers pay bills and invest in crypto and U.S. stocks.
Below are the 25 newcomers that made our list this year:
Ava Labs
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $6 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Initialized Capital and others
Bona fides: Over 2.4 million users; Avalanche’s token AVAX has an $8.5 billion market capitalization.
Cofounders: CEO Emin Gün Sirer, 50, former Cornell University computer science professor known for his research on distributed systems; COO Kevin Sekniqi, 28; chief protocol architect Ted Yin, 27.
Creator of Avalanche, a competitor to Ethereum, the most popular decentralized blockchain platform that applications can run on top of. Over the past year, more than 500 decentralized finance apps have been built on Avalanche, which can process 4,500 transactions per second, compared to just 14 per second for Ethereum.
Brigit
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $37.5 million from Lightspeed, DCM, NYCA and others
Latest valuation: $140 million
Bona fides: Almost half a million paying users, plus over three million accounts using the app’s free features.
Cofounders: CEO Zuben Mathews, 42, a Delhi native and University of Chicago grad who was an investment banker with Deutsche Bank for a decade; CTO Hamel Kothari, 28, a member of the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Financial app aimed at helping Americans living on the edge build up their money management skills and credit scores, while avoiding bank overdrafts and traditional payday advance loans. The $9.99 a month subscription service links to a user’s bank account and based on their cash flow approves them for an interest free loan of $50 to $250. It also uses machine learning algorithms to automatically extend that loan if needed to prevent bank account overdrafts. (Only one loan is allowed at a time.) Brigit’s credit builder feature links a term loan with a savings account which is used to ensure timely loan payments–those on-time payments get reported to the credit bureaus and can boost users’ credit scores by as much as 60 points, Brigit says. A free version of the app provides advice, but no loans.
Chipper Cash
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $280 million from Deciens Capital, FTX Ribbit Capital and others
Latest valuation: $2.2 billion
Bona fides: Revenue grew from $18 million in 2020 to more than $75 million in 2021.
Cofounders: Ugandan native Ham Serunjogi, 28, is CEO; CTO Maijid Moujaled, 30, grew up in Ghana; the pair met at Grinnell College in Iowa.
App that lets customers in five African countries, the U.S. and the U.K. pay bills, make cross-border money transfers and buy bitcoin. It earns revenue through foreign-exchange fees and crypto brokerage commissions. Chipper grew from roughly two million registered users in 2020 to more than five million by the end 2021. One-third of its 350 employees are U.S.-based.
Clearco
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
Funding: $600 million from SoftBank, Oak HC/FT, Sozo Ventures and others
Latest valuation: $2 billion
Bona fides: Has deployed more than $3.2 billion into some 7,000 firms, with client base nearly doubling last year.
Cofounders: CEO Michele Romanow, 36, and executive chair Andrew D’Souza, 37, former romantic partners with vast experience as executives in the Canadian tech industry.
Funds ecommerce startups via revenue-sharing agreements plus a 6-12% fee. Investments range from $10,000 to $20 million. “Blind funding” algorithms help generate term sheets in 20 minutes without the use of increasingly popular facial-recognition technology, and accompanying software helps clients track metrics like revenue and ad campaign performance. Funds nine times more racially diverse founders and 25 times more women founders than the average venture capital portfolio. Clients include viral eyelash company Glamnetic and period-proof underwear-maker Ruby Love.
Column
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $50 million plus from husband-and-wife cofounders
Bona fides: Already counts Brex, Plaid and debit card startup Point as customers. Cofounders: Co-CEO William Hockey, 32, a billionaire who cofounded Plaid in 2013 and sold some of his Plaid shares to finance Column; Co-CEO Annie Hockey, 32, a former Bain consultant and Stanford MBA.
Cofounders: Co-CEO William Hockey, 32, a billionaire who cofounded Plaid in 2013 and sold some of his Plaid shares to finance Column; Co-CEO Annie Hockey, 32, a former Bain consultant and Stanford MBA.
Tech-focused, federally chartered bank that aims to replace the patchwork of financial services providers that fintech digital “banks” (that aren’t technically banks) need to partner with. Offers services like holding customer deposits, processing bank-to-bank transfers, running wire transfers and lending. All built around the nucleus of a one-branch national bank in Chico, California, with $300 million in deposits, which the founders bought last year for $50 million.
Creative Juice
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $20 million from Index Ventures, Acrew Capital, Inspired Capital and others
Latest valuation: $tk
Bona fides: Creative Juice formally launched in November and is already valued at between $75 million and $100 million, according to sources close to the company. Its backers include MrBeast (95 million YouTube subscribers), former NFL star Larry Fitzgerald and Twitch cofounder Justin Kan.
Cofounders: CEO Sima Gandhi, 39, a veteran of Plaid, AMEX and the Obama Treasury; Ezra Cooperstein, 42, president of Night, a creator management company.
This startup aims to become a key financial cog in the creator economy with a two-pronged strategy. One prong is a digital banking app designed specifically for creators. The other is a service to help some YouTube and other creators grow their online businesses by providing capital infusions of $25,000 to a half-million in exchange for a share of their revenue.
DriveWealth
Headquarters: Jersey City, New Jersey
Funding: $550 million from Accel, Insight Partners, Point72 and others
Latest valuation: $2.85 billion
Bona fides: The number of people trading with DriveWealth’s software climbed from 7.2 million to 15 million last year, and the company’s valuation jumped more than 10x.
Founder: Executive chairman Bob Cortright, 64, who spent 30 years working in trading and markets before founding DriveWealth in 2012; he was CEO until this May, when he was replaced by Terry Angelos, 48, former head of fintech and crypto at Visa.
A recent surge in retail investing has also driven a surge in DriveWealth’s retail brokerage business: Clients like Revolut, Cash App, MoneyLion and Chipper Cash use DriveWealth’s software to embed fractional stock trading and other investing tools into their own apps and platforms. Earlier this year, DriveWealth bought a company called Crypto-Systems to expand into crypto trading.
FTX
Headquarters: Nassau, Bahamas
Funding: $1.8 billion from Sequoia, Temasek, Thoma Bravo and others
Latest valuation: $32 billion
Bona fides: Reached roughly $1 billion in revenue in 2021; grew its customer base from 246,000 in 2020 to 3.1 million in 2021.
Cofounders: CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, the world’s second-richest crypto billionaire, and CTO Gary Wang, 28.
One of the largest crypto trading exchanges in the world, it handles some 11% of the $2.4 trillion in derivatives traded each month. The company raised $1.5 billion in private funding last year, jolting its valuation from $1.2 billion to $25 billion. A $500 million raise this past January took its valuation to $32 billion. Eager to become a household name, FTX is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, signing up celebrity brand ambassadors including Tom Brady, David Ortiz and Kevin O’Leary, as it goes after U.S. customers with a separate entity, FTX US, valued at $8 billion.
GoodLeap
Headquarters: Roseville, California
Funding: $1.6 billion from New Enterprise Associates, WestCap, Michael Dell and others
Latest valuation: $12 billion
Bona fides: Its app is now used by more than 18,000 home-improvement businesses, up from 12,000 at the end of 2020.
Cofounders: Chair and CEO Hayes Barnard, 50, and Chief Revenue Officer Matt Dawson, 48, two longtime executives at SolarCity (now Tesla Energy); and Chief Risk Officer Jason Walker, 48, a veteran mortgage broker.
Its platform and app have funneled $13 billion in financing to about 380,000 homeowners making green home upgrades—half of that just within the past year. Contractors and vendors use GoodLeap’s point-of-sale app to get their customers’ loans instantly approved; partner banks, including Goldman Sachs, make the loans and then securitize the debt to sell to investors, using its software to track loan performance. After starting with solar panel loans, last year GoodLeap expanded to more than 20 categories of sustainable improvements, including battery storage, energy-efficient windows and water-saving turf.
Grow Credit
Headquarters: Santa Monica, California
Funding: $11 million from Mucker Capital, Commerce Ventures and Arena Investors
Latest valuation: $26 million
Bona fides: 2,000 customers, up from 8,000 at the end of 2020.
Cofounders: CEO Joe Bayen, 46, a serial entrepreneur whose startups include an iPhone app discovery marketplace that attracted 12 million users called Free App A Day.
Issues novel “virtual” Mastercard for those with thin or no credit history looking to boost their credit scores. The card, which charges no interest (but carries a monthly fee of $2 to $8), can be used to pay recurring subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify and is linked to the user’s bank account for automatic on-time payments that build a credit history, boosting credit scores as much as 50 points, Grow says. Later this year, it plans to launch a more conventional physical credit card with a 15% to 18% interest rate that users can “graduate” to.
Hopper
Headquarters: Montreal, Canada
Funding: $580 million from Omers Ventures, Capital One, GPI Capital and others
Latest valuation: $5 billion
Bona fides: $150 million in 2021 revenue, up from $40 million in 2020; app has 70 million lifetime downloads.
Cofounders: CEO Frederic Lalonde, 48, who dropped out of college at 19 and started a travel data startup that Expedia bought in 2002; former head of B2B engineering Joost Ouwerkerk, 50.
Travel booking site launched in 2014 as a free app that predicted the cheapest time to book a flight, it now offers additional features, such as home rentals and a novel program that lets customers pay an extra fee—usually 10% to 20% of a ticket’s price—to freeze a flight’s price for up to a week. If the fare rises and the customer buys the ticket, Hopper eats the difference. Today, these new fintech products make up 40% of Hopper’s revenue, with the rest coming from traditional commissions paid to travel agents. Nearly half of its employees are U.S.-based.
Melio
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $506 million from Thrive Capital, Tiger Global Management, Coatue and others
Latest valuation: $4 billion
Bona fides: Is now processing about $2 billion a month, up from $600 million a year ago.
Cofounders: CEO Matan Bar, 37, who previously led peer-to-peer payments at PayPal; CTO Ilan Atias, 43; former COO Ziv Paz, 38.
Helps small businesses pay bills and get paid online, instead of through paper checks. Differentiating itself from larger competitor Bill.com, Melio targets tiny mom and pop shops whose owners often aren’t accounting savvy. It charges customers a 1% fee to expedite a same-day payment and a 2.9% to pay by credit card. Half of its employees and all of its customers are U.S.-based.
Mercury
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $152 million from Coatue Management, Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and others
Latest valuation: $1.62 billion
Bona fides: Customers grew fourfold to 45,000 in 2021.
Cofounders: CEO Immad Akhund, 38, sold mobile advertising startup Heyzap to Fyber for $45 million in 2016; COO Jason Zhang, 31; CTO Max Tagher, 30. Both Zhang and Tagher worked for Akhund at Heyzap.
Digital banking platform for startups, offering no-fee checking and savings accounts, debit cards, wire transfers and currency exchange. Its $15 million in 2021 revenue came primarily from interchange on debit card transactions and a share of interest on deposits. But in March, it expanded into venture debt–term loans for up to four years, typically for between 25% and 50% of a recent (within the last 12 months) equity funding round. Mercury, which charges interest and takes a warrant to buy a small amount of stock, aims to lend out $200 million this year.
Modern Treasury
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $183 million from Altimeter Capital, Benchmark, Y Combinator and others
Latest valuation: $2.1 billion
Bona fides: Now moving $3 billion a month, up 200% from $1 billion a year ago.
Cofounders: CEO Dimitri DadioSociétémov, 37; CTO Sam Aarons, 29; chief product officer Matt Marcus, 28; the three met working for real estate lender LendingHome (now Kiavi).
Back-end payments software used by more than 100 enterprise customers, including Marqeta, ClassPass and BlockFi, to move money in and out of bank accounts through wire transfers, ACH and Real-Time Payments transactions. Customers pay a monthly $499 fee plus 10 cents and 0.1% per transaction, or can negotiate a custom annual fee. Its add-on products can track transactions and balances in multiple currencies, including crypto, and direct payments into virtual sub-accounts of linked bank accounts.
Morty
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $38 million from Thrive Capital, Lerer Hippeau, March Capital and others
Latest valuation: $150 million
Bona fides: Has processed more than $1.2 billion in loans to date; had revenue of $3 million in 2021, up from $1.5 million in 2020.
Cofounders: CEO Nora Apsel, 39; CTO Adam Rothblatt, 38.
An online mortgage marketplace founded and run by engineers, Morty aggregates mortgage rates from a range of lenders, offering buyers an easy way to search for competitive rates. Once a customer has locked a loan, Morty guides them throughout the entire process, step-by-step. Like more old-fashioned mortgage brokers, Morty makes its money by charging lenders a fee when the loan closes.
Novo
Headquarters: Miami, Florida
Funding: $135 million from Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital and others
Latest valuation: $700 million
Bona fides: Novo’s customer base swelled from 24,000 to 140,000 in 2021, as it capitalized on a burst of small business creation in the U.S.
Cofounders: CEO Michael Rangel, 35, former head trader at Fairholme Capital Management; CTO Tyler McIntyre, 30.
Aiming to replace the big banks as the go-to provider of checking accounts and other banking services for small businesses. The company took a slow and steady approach: It was founded in 2016 but didn’t launch until 2018, taking time to build its app from scratch instead of relying on third-party APIs and getting by on under $7 million in seed capital (and a federal PPP forgivable loan) until mid-2021, when it started raising serious expansion funds.
OpenSea
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $423 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Haun Ventures and others
Latest valuation: $13.3 billion
Bona fides: Has been processing about $3 billion in NFT transactions monthly, earning about $75 million in monthly revenue.
Cofounders: CEO Devin Finzer, 31, and CTO Alex Atallah, 30. They became the first NFT billionaires in January 2021.
Founded nearly five years ago, this startup was an early player in the NFT market that took off in 2021. It operates as a peer-to-peer platform where users can create, buy and sell all sorts of NFTs—in exchange for a 2.5% cut of each sale. Although OpenSea is facing heightened competition, including from crypto giant Coinbase, which launched its own NFT marketplace in May, it continues to dominate the NFT market with more than 1.5 million accounts having transacted on the platform.
Persona
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $217.5 million from Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Coatue Management and others
Latest valuation: $1.5 billion
Bona fides: Persona claims about 500 customers, up from 100 a year ago.
Cofounders: CEO Rick Song, 31, and CTO Charles Yeh, 29; Song is a former engineer at Square, while Yeh was technical lead at Dropbox.
Makes identify verification tools used by the likes of Robinhood, Square, Brex and BlockFi to confirm their customers are who they say they are, whether they’re opening an account, making major withdrawals or trading cryptocurrencies. Persona aims to stand out from a crowded KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) field with its customizable, no-code platform built to adapt to the varying identity needs of different companies and industries.
Pipe
Headquarters: Miami, Florida
Funding: $315 million from Craft Ventures, Stepstone, Fin VC and others
Latest valuation: $2 billion
Bona fides: Counts more than 12,000 sellers including software, subscription and streaming service firms—ballooning eight-fold in one year.
Cofounders: Co-CEOs Harry Hurst, 32, and Josh Mangel, 29, who started a Los Angeles car-rental company that was acquired in 2018; and CTO Zain Allarakhia, 29.
Proprietary trading platform allows businesses to raise money by selling recurring revenue streams to hundreds of institutional investors. Revenue streams are anonymized and packaged together according to risk profile, with an average return in the mid-single digits. Sellers, ranging from startups to publicly listed firms, have raised billions of dollars on the platform since its debut in June 2020, including $1.2 billion last year. In September, Pipe expanded outside the U.S., launching in the United Kingdom.
Public.com
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $310 million from Accel, Greycroft, Tiger Global Management and others
Latest valuation: $1.2 billion
Bona fides: User base has exploded to three million from less than one million at the end of 2020.
Cofounders: Co-CEOs Jannick Malling, 34, and Leif Abraham, 36—serial entrepreneurs hailing from Denmark and Germany, respectively.
Brokerage app offering commission-free investing in stocks, ETFs and crypto, as well as fractional trading of NFTs and other collectibles and the ability for users to share their portfolios and trades–if they want to. Last year, Pulse stopped taking payments for order flow, a controversial practice that free-trading rivals like Robinhood still rely on, and debuted an optional tipping feature. In April it launched another new revenue source–a “Pulse” service that allows companies wanting to promote their stocks to pay for data about retail investors and to hold town halls. Early customers include buzzy cannabis stock Tilray and Dubai ride-hailer Swvl.
Stronghold
Headquarters: Oakland, California
Funding: $6 million from Array VC, Freestyle VC, Precursor Ventures and others
Bona fides: Grew revenue from $1 million in 2020 to $7 million in 2021.
Cofounders: CEO Tammy Camp, 43, former head of growth at cryptocurrency Stellar; CTO Sean Bennett, 29, who previously cofounded crypto and compliance technology startups.
Payment processing startup lets companies like cannabis dispensaries, alcohol retailers and sports gaming sites accept payments online. In 2018, it minted its own cryptocurrency, SHX token, and today it distributes those tokens to customers as loyalty rewards.
TripActions
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
Funding: $1.1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Capital, Zeev Ventures and others.
Latest valuation: $7.25 billion
Bona fides: 9,000 total corporate customers, including Netflix, Adobe and Heineken, up from 3,600 at the end of 2020.
Cofounders: CEO Ariel Cohen, 46 and CTO Ilan Twig, 49. The Israeli-born executives are Hewlett-Packard veterans who previously cofounded StreamOnce, a business collaboration platform they sold in 2013.
Travel and expense software startup that caters to large companies and competes with Concur. It has its own corporate card, Liquid, which simplifies expense management and lets employers set custom spending limits for their employee cardholders. Revenue from its Liquid card comprises about 25% of TripActions’ total revenue–the rest comes from business lines like collecting sales commissions from hotels and airlines.
TRM Labs
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $80 million from Blockchain Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tiger Global and others
Latest valuation: $600 million
Bona fides: FTX and Circle are clients; its 90-person team includes threat finance veterans from the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and Europol and data scientists from Apple, Amazon and Google.
Cofounders: CEO Esteban Castaño, 31, previously an analyst at McKinsey; CTO Rahul Raina, 28, a former software engineer at Amazon and member of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.
Helps financial institutions and government agencies like the IRS investigate money laundering, crypto fraud and other financial crimes by analyzing blockchain data. Its tools let customers monitor transactions across more than one million assets on 26 different blockchains. Funding: $80 million from Blockchain Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tiger Global and others.
Upgrade
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $600 million from Coatue, DST, Ribbit Capital and others
Latest valuation: $6.3 billion
Bona fides: In 2021, it more than quadrupled annual revenue over the prior year, reaching $410 million.
Cofounders: CEO Renaud Laplanche, 51, founder and former CEO of online lender. LendingClub; CFO Jeff Bogan, 42; SVP Adelina Grozdanova, 38; SVP Matt Wierman, 50; CIO Visar Nimani, 47.
The six-year-old personal loan fintech offers a credit card (paying 1% to 3% cash back) that also functions like a personal loan: you can get a credit line ranging from $500 to $25,000, have a fixed deadline to pay it off and can make payments in equal monthly installments. The lender recently launched a bitcoin rewards card and a no-fee checking account that gives users 2% cash back on everyday purchases.
Valon
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $90 million from a16z, 166, real estate investment trust New Residential and others.
Latest valuation: $590 million
Bona fides: Less than two years after its 2020 launch, the company has reached $6 billion in total mortgages serviced.
Cofounders: CEO and 30 Under 30 alum Andrew Wang, 29; CTO and 30 Under 30 alum Jonathan Hsu, 29; Product Manager Eric Chiang, 30.
A cloud-based mortgage-servicing platform, Valon brings down the cost to mortgage investors of servicing loans by automating payments and allowing borrowers to see online their balance and other information about their loans. Last year, Valon secured approval from the Federal Housing Administration and Freddie Mac to service government-backed loans.